Follow these strategies to boost your Excel mastery

January 3, 2013

Excel is a must-have software program, whether you use your laptop at home or the desktop in your office. With Excel, you can swiftly evaluate if you’re pulling in enough revenue to pay your mortgage statement this month. It is possible to instantly figure out which of your company’s sales guys are or aren’t boosting the results. You can even calculate which of your fantasy football team’s running backs and wide receivers are getting you the most fantasy points. Even so, many users aren’t using Excel to the full capability. Don’t be one too. Study the three tips below to help make Excel work even better for you.

Adding non-contiguous values

You may have learned that Excel’s AutoSum option is a fantastic tool, permitting you to add rows of numbers together fast. However, did you know that you can utilize AutoSum to add values which are not contiguous, or adjacent, to each other? The TechRebpublic blog recently explored how to do this. As the Website says, if you would like add the sales amounts of two sales people — whose sales numbers aren’t listed adjacent to each other — simply choose one sales person’s column of numbers and then hold down your computer’s “Control” key to select a second column. Then you can use AutoSum to calculate the sales numbers of both of these sales guys.

Preventing bad data entry

What’s more aggravating than when your employees enter the wrong form of data — say words instead of numbers or numbers with decimal points instead of whole numbers — within their spreadsheets? Who knows? But the good news is that Excel has a function that is able to stop this unsuitable data entry. As PC Magazine wrote in a recent online story, the Excel feature that can stop these problems is termed Data Validation. Basically, the feature will allow you to set the limits about what kind of data — say, text but not numbers — your spreadsheet will accept. To access Data Validation, click on the “Table Tools” tab. Next, click “Data Validation.” You will be now able to enter exactly what type of data your employees should enter in your spreadsheet. For example, you could tell Excel to allow only whole numbers rather than numbers with decimal points.

Don’t let unsaved files ruin your day

You’re part way through creating a long Excel file when your computer suddenly shuts down. That’s a great deal of work now wasted, right? Actually, no. Excel now features a function that allows you to easily recover these “lost” documents. Here’s the secret: First, click the “File” tab in your Excel program. Next, click the “Recover Unsaved Documents” option. Now you can just click on the document once it appears on your screen. In addition, here’s another amazing fact: This will work even for those Excel files which you never even gave a name before you lost them.